The online Spiegel today has a report on a new book titled The Book of Miracles which presents and examines a collection of 16th century depictions of celestial phenomena and portentous signs. They were recently discovered as part of a collection of 169 illustrations created in Augsburg, Germany around 1552. End-of-world visions, it turns out, are a human mental disorder that has been around for as long as civilization itself.

The images were created as Europe was in the grips of the Little ice Age, a time of bad weather, bitter cold, storms and crop failures, starvation and human misery. The 16th century depictions reveal images of a civilization obsessed with the end-of-the-world. Priests and elitists of the time conducted terrifying witch hunts to find those allegedly responsible for the black magic that cooked up the extreme weather.

Sound familiar?

The book containing the collection of images was authored by Joshua P. Waterman of the University of Indiana and Till-Holger Borchert of the University of Oregon. The collection of images depict demons, fire, drought, and torrential rains – of blood, stones and hail falling from the sky, which brought or warned of unimaginable misery for sinners on earth.

When one compares these hallucinatory depictions to today’s bleak climate scenarios coming from climate scientists, and their shrill demands that we radically change our behavior, the parallels could hardly be more striking.

Spiegel writes:

The Augsburg Book of Miracles (German title: Wunderzeichenbuch) illustrates how mankind from antiquity to the Renaissance imagined the end of things. As a rule: frightening. Only very few positive heavenly appearances are seen in between.”

The Protestant viewer would have reflected on the greater significance of these wonders: Why are there dragons in the sky? Why does it rain blood? Why are there three suns overhead? We know from contemporary sources that the answer was general: Things are wrong in the world. Repent and prepare for the end times, which are possibly now.”

Aren’t the similarities to the climate science establishment absolutely stunning? Once again today mankind is being led by obsessive, paranoid charlatans warning of unprecedented colossal weather disasters. Really, there is no other way to accurately describe today’s climate science schizophrenia.

Spiegel writes that the book’s 167 pages “illustrates the angst” of the times, many having to do with weather extremes. For example one illustration (see above) shows a massive hailstorm hitting Dordrecht Holland on May 17, 1552. Note the perceived “weirdness”.

Spiegel writes:

Lightning strikes, comets and the unknown were regarded as the Wrath of God, or as omens for bad things to come. … Starvation, disease, locusts and falling stars. Many of these signs were distributed as pamphlets. And many of these phenomena indeed happened, says Waterman. But the ten-headed monster with horns and a crown of course never existed.”

Extreme weather events being taken as signs for the coming end, unless sinful ways are repented, is as old as civilization. Today’s climate panic is merely just the latest relapse into a very old mental disorder that has afflicted mankind for thousands of years. The only antidote is reason and knowledge.

Noteworthy: Der Spiegel does not tell its readers about the LIA in the article.
Connections between climate and history are still never being made in German National Green press; yet we are to believe that CO2AGW will for the first time ever be an influence of the climate on human history.

I am curious to see what the trolls will argument about this analogy. It must be hard to accept to have a sort of mental disorder. Blaming man is their only possibility. They are not empowered to act. More and more climate skeptics are among us. They can’t hunt witches, can’t pay “indulgences” to the Church, they can’t force us except by using guilt that is less and less effective.

I don’t really like this. It is really about naturalism versus supernaturalism, meaninglessness versus meaning, not mental illness.

The floods in England are said by some to be punishment for recent government legislation. How do we know if it is true or not? Can science provide the answer? When we take into account that the rain has not been record breaking, that the levels were not able to drain into silted up rivers because they were not dredged, that there was a desire to flood the levels anyway, to help the parsnips, then perhaps we have our answer, but it is not always so clear.

The naturalist has no problems with any of these claims because he by nature dismisses anything supernatural. For him there is always a natural explanation even if he can’t find it. The people of York still believe that the south transept fire was a divine act of judgement but the naturalist says there was a lightning strike even though there was no such weather anywhere around.

Naturalism denies that anything like this can exist, that there are no portents of doom of any divine origin. The same reasoning has been applied to the Bible and argues that there is nothing in it that is supernatural and then finds ways to dismiss anything supernatural in it. Naturalism by definition cannot accept anything supernatural.

The fact that naturalists cannot accept anything supernatural does not mean that nothing supernatural can exist. That ancient peoples and unreasoning minds have sought explanations for natural events in unnatural explanations is clear, but it reflects man’s desire to understand meaning. The naturalist denies that meaning in life exists and that everything is a natural consequence of something else. It is this view that has hijacked real science. The testing and challenging has gone for some fields of research because of this attitude, particularly in historical science.

In the old soviet union, Christians and others were deemed to have a mental illness and treated accordingly. In Germany even unemployment was deemed a mental illness worthy of a life ending event. The naturalist led western world is heading the same way again. It is to be expected that those who believe in the supernatural will expect supernatural signs even if they mistake and misinterpret what they see as a consequence of the demise of their society.

So, I would say, there are many who see signs today, signs of judgement and “signs and wonders” which can easily be dismissed, but God is not constrained by this. Science cannot rule over the acts of God.

How we respond to this naturalistic world view will also determine the future of our society, whether we ever see supernatural signs or not.

Der Spiegel is just too Red-Green fanatic to actually inform its readers. If they did they would point out that these hailstorms were real -due to the LIA-; and that frequently, flour spoiled by Mutterkorn hallucinogenics would drive entire villages into a psychic frenzy after said village had consumed the bread baked with that spoiled flour – this should have given reasons for depicting some hallucinatory visions as well.

Really sad that in the 21st century, humans want to invoke a “god” as the source of natural events and continue to worship same as the source of all knowledge that is beyone our human understanding. Might as well still be throwing virgins into volcanoes, divining the future by throwing some bones on the gr0und or reading tea leaves, and just not doing anything useful as it may not be part of “god’s plan”.

Religion isn’t a mental illness, but it certainly is a genetic holdover from our hunter/gatherer days (see Faces In the Clouds or The Third Chimpanzee) and socially retarded step back to the Bronze Age. There just isn’t anything sillier than religion and, unfortunately, more harmful to a modern society trying to break out of the Dark Ages.

The problem here is that some scientists are acting hysterically in believing that a little less ice in the Arctic (which BTW has been recovering) is an ominous sign of terrible things to come, and that the end is near should we not repent. They and those who follow them really do look foolish.

Skeptics have spent YEARS patiently examining every hair brained claim of the nutters. A great many of them have been respectful, and treated their opponents as rational, reasoning scientists. They tried in vain to return the discussion to scientific ground, to look dispassionately at evidence, and avoid decisions where adequate evidence did not exist. All for naught. The nutters simply screeched “heresy!”

We’re finally entering a phase where even the most polite and disciplined of the skeptics can no longer ignore the true nature of the climate kooks. Scientific evaluation body slammed the CO2 fantasy early on, but the climate cult lived on.

I look forward to the time when all laypersons will see this for what it is, when we can remove the kooks from our scientific institutions and heap the derision upon them that they so richly deserve.

That’s a stupid request, to say it in polite terms. Science and truth don’t work in the backwards manner you seem to suggest. It is up to those who are proposing the hypothesis that CO2 causes major climate change to prove that it does.

“I see no race of men,” wrote Cicero, “however polished and educated, however brutal and barbarous, which does not believe that warnings of future events are given and may be understood and announced by certain persons.”

Not to be missed in this context is Norman Cohn’s classic book The persuit of the Millennium. A few years ago I have read it with Google Books. It is about the end-of-the-world sects in Europe during the eleventh till sixteenth centuries. Especially interesting is his profile of the cult leaders, in which modern types like Al Gore nicely fit. See Amazon for a description.

Also may want to have a peek at: Michael Schermer’s “The Believing Brain”. Pretty good in identifying and illustrating the the creation and consequent need to persist in this believe, irrespective of new data.

I agree that the guilt-ridden Western mentality seems to be continued as an underlying current in the “climate crises” discussion. The agenda of man-made disaster awakens subconscious memories, going all the way back to the idea of Hubris.

At the same time one should not put too much stress on the negative aspects of the cold period of the LIA. Bad for crops, no doubt, and harsh winters strain the resources of society, but it was the LIA period from the 15th to the 19th century that saw European culture dominate most of the world, and the foundations laid in those days, both in science, art, technology and politics are what our society is still based on.

Let us not err in the opposite direction of the warmists, by making the LIA worse than it was. Put the stress on the “L”.

There was an interesting paper a couple of years ago by Fabien Locher and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz “Modernity’s Frail Climate”.

It’s about the changing perceptions of human effects on the climate. Many of the examples are from France in the 18th century, for instance, after the revolution (1789-1799), “the peasants … who had supposedly chopped and pillaged the noble timber were blamed for every meteorological incident”.

It wasn’t always blame though – agriculture was credited with giving Europe a more temperate climate than Africa or the Americas, and plans were hatched for ‘geoengineering’ the climate of north Africa.

Mental disorder? The only mental disorder displayed in this article is the one you appear to be in the grip of by suggesting that the earth has not experienced cataclysms of various sizes and natures over the past few thousand years. Read some history while your at it.

Don’t write off the sins and wickedness of man so quickly. There’s a lot wrong with how humans run the planet — and for every mental disorder you come up with, I can point to a deliberate (and allegedly sane) action that disregards the well-being of others. One kind of which is the construction of false science for economic gain and status.

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